The Blind Photographer

...“That biblical story about the seven good years and the seven bad years? That happened to me,” Ms. Soberats, 77, said in an interview at her home in Jackson Heights.

“I think their sickness helped me cope with my blindness. Because I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking about them. How much they were suffering, how much they were going through.”

...“I feel your face, your hair, then I’ll ask you: ‘Are you light-colored? Or dark? Is your hair blonde or brown or black?’ ” she said. “So with asking and touching, then I’ll get an idea of what I have to work with.”

“It surprised me that the human mind can do whatever it wants if we work toward it,” Ms. Soberats said.

Read and see her vision on LENS.

Picasso and Dali discuss life

They are speaking in A Century is Nothing.

"Have you thought of a name for your new work my friend?” asked Dali.

   “Guernica comes to mind,” Pablo said.

   “How appropriate,” Dali replied, stroking his exquisite mustache. “It will become a classic. It will connect the wild subconscious and rationality. It’ll make you famous, old boy.”

   Picasso’s Guernica commemorated the small Basque village of 10,000 in northern Spain. It was market day on Monday, April 27, 1937. In the afternoon waves of planes from the Condor Legion, Heinkel 51s and Junker 52s piloted by Germans blasted Guernica. Survivors found 1,660 corpses and 890 wounded people in the rubble.

   “Be that as it may,” Pablo replied. “Art historians and critics will have their say hey kid. It will shock supporters of social realism and propaganda art in France and Spain.”

   “How did you do it?” Dali queried.

   “From May 1st to June 4th in 1937 I made forty-five drawings on blue or black paper. I incorporated the bull, the horse, classic bullfighting figures and the lantern from my 1935 Minotauromachy. I used the weeping Dora Maar because she has always been a woman who weeps. Guernica is a bereavement letter saying everything we love is going to die. And that is why everything we love is embodied in something unforgettably beautiful, like the emotion of a final farewell.”

   “I still think your vision aspires to greater heights,” said Dali. “Your work contains your fantasies meeting the objective violence of history.”

   “You are too kind my dear Dali. People are talking about your work. Your intentional dreams, so strangely manifested, in the way you masterfully allowed your subconscious free rein on the canvas. Most amazing, your Persistence of Memory.”

   “You are too generous Pablo. I merely reflect the ongoing crisis in society, the surreal absurd nightmare, with shall we say, a twisted rather sordid but truthful elusive creative beast we must acknowledge to allow our perverse authenticity freedom wherever it leads us.”

   “So true my friend, for we are only the conduit of the magic,” said Pablo. “We paint what we see with our innermost senses, born by authentic inner visions.”

   “We are the mysteries speaking through the mysteries,” said Salvador. 

see with camera

How many tourists see only through their camera? Millions. 

According to Orphan, They feel the experience of 8th century Angkor artistic splendor only with their cameras, these cold impersonal little tools. Their entire experience is defined by their camera. Obscura.

It's not about knowing, understanding the Khmer people, culture, food, art, music, and language. It's about feeling with a camera. They are in a big fat hurry.

They've learned through hard fast lessons to trust the machine. It is their weapon against mediocrity and boredom and shallow emptiness. They don't comprehend the intricacies of the machine. They believe it can and will save them. The machine controls them. They gratefully accept this reality.

They press optical machines tight against their faces, piercing retinas, flickering lids. Point and shoot. They lower the device and stare with hard lost eyes at the virtual image of their faded memory. They judge it. Evaluate. DELETE!

Shoot again. Point. Shoot. Delete. Repeat. A snapshot. Snap a shot. Preserve this moment forever. Quick! They must go. They must move to the next great big thing. They are in a hurry. Death is close.

The tuk-tuk driver is impatient. He wants more money for his time. He waited when they slept, while they screwed. He waited as they stuffed eggs, watermelon and soft bread into tired bored faces. They ate like animals. They point and shoot. They delete.

Hurry! They have no time to see their obscurity. This loss, this sense of amnesia envelops them. It accompanies them through radioactive meltdowns. It is a dark cloud of forgetting. They remember to forget. They are on a Homeric quest of infinite proportions and infinite magnitude. 

Their memory card is full. They attach electrodes to a cerebral cortex and press the DownLoad switch. Memories of Apsara dancers, elephants, monkeys, celestial deities flicker on a screen behind their eyes.

Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of compassion smiles.

Metis

As an entomologist, a hunter-gatherer with Metis, a cunning intelligence, seeking visual epiphanies, he opened his aperture to f/1.4 and let in light. All of it. Blinding light, prisms of kaleidoscopes, muted spectrums in waves and particles guided his vision to see and stop time. 

Manipulate a tool. A well designed black foreign range finder. A camera obscura. It had the finesse of a magnifying glass, a Hubble telescope looking into an expanding infinite universe, illuminating distant black holes sucking matter into a void. He couldn’t see the black holes but he knew they were there.

It was one thing he carried. He started carrying it in Nam.

It was just a tool. It allowed him to stop time. Divide time in two.

The kairos of his eye allowed him to discriminate intuitively. An eye and a mirror. It refined his being, one with the subject, how silence worked, a detached observer, a photojournalist. How to disappear inside the scene, move with the quickness of a wild animal, see, visualize, anticipate the impending decisive moment stalking his prey with cunning. How to freeze, compose in the viewfinder, breath, squeeze, advance with a quick flick of the opposable thumb, load, unload, develop, fix, print, label, and file his work. Film was his prayer wheel.

blindness

I stepped outside of myself and saw a blind man going down life’s street. Neither of us had seen each other before. 

Dressed in rags, he stooped under the weight of a torn shouldered bag. His right hand stabbed cracked cement with a crooked staff. He had no left hand. In the middle of the sidewalk he stumbled into a parked motorcycle, adjusting his way around it.

Chinese schoolgirls eating sweet junk food on sharp sticks whispering silent secrets about his stupidity passed me with empty black wide open eyes. They were changed to the earth to pay for the freedom of their eyes.

I remembered, If a man wants to be sure of his road he must close his eyes and walk in the dark, or a blind man crossing a bridge is a good example how we should live our lives, the enlightened mind.

I followed him. I sensed a lesson in existence.

He continued scraping his staff against steps leading to shops and worked his way along a long concrete wall. At the far end sat a beggar in rags made from boiled books.

His skeleton supported a battered dirty greasy cap, threadbare jacket, no socks, broken shoes. He struggled to light a fractured cigarette. His cracked begging bowl was empty.

The blind man ran into him.

“Go around” screamed the beggar. “Can’t you see I’m here you idiot!”

“Sorry. I didn’t see you.”

“This is my space! Keep moving you fool. Pay attention.”